Following negotiations, it was I who made the chicken stew a few weeks ago, but Mom did part of the shopping. She recuperated so rapidly from her operation that she was able to do a short hike in the Hoh rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula last Monday. Back in action in time for spring! We're all really pleased that her recovery has gone so well.

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Last week, during a business trip to Washington, DC, I was able to fit in 3 hours at the National Gallery before my flight home. I joined a docent tour on 19th-century French art.

During the tour, we stopped before a painting by Corot, completed a few years before the Impressionist period. It's a painting I've often enjoyed in the past, showing a young woman in a summer dress lying in a grassy glade in a forest, elbows propped, reading a book. To me, it seems the picture of a perfect Saturday afternoon.

But the docent explained that the picture was unacceptable to the art establishment of the time. To the Academy, only two kinds of subjects should be depicted in art: Biblical and classical Greek or Roman scenes. And only two kinds of people should be depicted in paintings: well-known Biblical or classical characters.

Corot's painting was unacceptable because it showed an ordinary person doing an ordinary activity. It was all the more unacceptable because the viewer would guess from the context that the book was a novel rather than scripture or classical literature. The Academy rejected it. But once it was shown in the Salon des Refusees--a special showing for rejected pieces--it gained public attention and praise, opening minds just enough to eventually make it possible for Impressionism to succeed as a movement.

I left the Gallery wondering what we consider unacceptable in our time that will seem utterly uncontroversial in the future.